Getting Over A Hump In The Gobi Desert

July 11, 2004|By Michael O'Sullivan The Washington Post

Incorporating both traditional documentary techniques as well as a sketchy, preconceived plot of sorts, The Story of the Weeping Camel sounds like it might not be that different, at least in theory, from so-called reality TV.

"You mean like Big Brother?" asks Luigi Falorni, an Italian filmmaker who, along with the Mongolian Byambasuren Davaa, directed the Gobi Desert-set film. Weeping Camel, which opened Friday at the Sunrise 11 in west Broward, chronicles an ancient nomadic ritual in which a camel that has refused to nurse its young is coaxed back into a maternal role through music.

After some back-and-forth discussion in German (the two met at film school in Munich), Falorni speaks. "One clear difference: You call it reality TV, but it's not reality. It's TV reality. What we try to do is find reality reality." To increase their chances of getting the film they wanted, they picked a Mongolian family with a large herd: 60 camels, 20 of which were pregnant at the time of filming, and exactly one of which did, in fact, reject her newborn calf, as the filmmakers had hoped would happen.

And what of the few sequences of daily Mongolian life that were re-created -- staged, in essence -- for the camera, rather than captured as they happened? Through a Mongolian interpreter, Davaa tells how she worked directly with the family, while Falorni shaped the elements of the story's structure.

"I think of myself more as a collaborator than as a director of the action. My approach was to involve the family as much as possible, particularly in some cases where I had to pretend that I didn't know the situation, or the answer, or the circumstances, so that they would come up with their own words."

Preferring to think of the characters in this real-life tale as neither traditional documentary "subjects," nor as "actors" in a quasi-fiction, Falorni and Davaa call them "protagonists." Unlike many other documentarians, they also prefer not to probe too deeply into what makes their protagonists, which in this case include camels, tick.

"We need to experience sometimes that life has a kind of poetry," Falorni explains. "I don't need a physiological or animal-psychological study of why the tears are coming. There's something poetic about it that I enjoyed from the first moment I heard about the results of the ritual, and I didn't question further."

Davaa agrees, explaining that she never fully appreciated the "backward" traditions of her homeland until she left it. The camel ritual, which she first learned about in a short, 17-minute documentary she saw as a child, held a kind of abiding, fairy-tale power that tugged on her imagination, even in adulthood.

"When there," her partner adds, "it seems organic, natural. You don't question. You don't ask the nomads, `Why is the camel weeping?' Well, that's how it is. You don't have to find a reason for everything."